Active Imagination

2 Responses to Active Imagination

1. David says:

   March 12, 2012 at 12:12 pm

   Hi Michael,

   Don’t know if this is an answer to your question to Hayward, but it does deal with something I’ve been thinking about as a result of Bruce’s post, “Worm-holes, Bubbles, and Sky” in which he mentions Peter Sloterdijk’s book, “Bubbles (Spheres Vol 1)”, which I have never read, but did see an interview posted here:

   http://www.bookforum.com/archive/feb_05/funcke.html

   In the interview there’s a discussion of the use of the evolving terms — spheres, bubbles, and globes, and I was reminded of Rinpoche’s use of the bubble/sphere metaphor also in regard to thought as space.

   Sloterdijk says in his first volume, “…words like sphere or globe are not metaphors but rather thought-images or, even better, thought-figures. After all, they first came out of geometry and had, beginning with Greek antiquity, a clear morphological sense, which turned into a cosmological sense after Plato.” He goes on to say, “With Bubbles I tried to describe the dyadic space of resonance between people as we find it in symbiotic relations — mother and child, Philemon and Baucis, psychoanalyst and analysand, mystics and God, etc.”

   You can read the entire interview at the link provided, but my point is that with my TSK orientation this talk about spheres and bubbles got me focusing within, as I observed my thinking about spheroids. Clearly I was observing my thoughts as structured things, but I began to see the spherical nature of my thought process, the ‘not this, but that’ nature of boundaries, the sliding value scales of this is good and that’s not so good. Like a bubble or a drop, I saw how a kind of surface tension was forming in space around what was allowed inside and what was being excluded, even while smaller dichotomies worked within, like subject and object, and ‘is’ and ‘is not’. I saw/felt the fields as numerous constellations of self-interest — I was not just imagining but living, an embodied foam of such space bubbles.

   So the question of what happens when you play with the idea that imagined visualizations might exist, seems to me, being aware of this ‘playing’ is key, because it can open to embodiment of the present moment and reveal whatever arises.
   David

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2. michaelg says:

   March 11, 2012 at 6:33 am

   Hi Hayward,
   What you describe sounds like a deliberate version of what we do blindly all the time: acting as if the objects we project have a substantial and independent reality. When you play with the idea that “imagined” visualizations might actually exist, does that help loosen the hold of all those other visualizations which we ordinarily don’t observe in operation? –Michael

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